Catheads

Guitarist Mark Zanandrea formed the Catheads in 1985 in San Francisco with lead guitarist Sam Babbitt (of the Ophelias), bassist Alan Korn (of X-Tal) and drummer Melanie Clarin (of the Donner Party). The traditional rock base of their early efforts belies the band's overriding sense of ironic inspired lunacy (whether in the demented blues of I Would Kill for Suzy or the grotesque pow-wow of Golden Gate Park).

Hubba (Restless, 1987) has a more mature, "serious" sound, while Zanandrea's crazed hippie sensibility continues to inject novelty into even the barroom with Power Love and Pizza, a tune worthy of Wreckless Eric. The band adopts the sweeping language of Television here, which Zanandrea marries with the garage rock of the Pretenders in Hanging Around and Korn combines with the rock and roll of X in Victim. In a more primitive vein, Babbitt offers the delta blues tune Need to Know, and Korn hams it up in the drunken country number Saved by the Bottle. Here and there, we hear strains of the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead, but ultimately the musical hodgepodge draws from all the rock influences of the last twenty years, from the rabid folk rock of New White Wings to the tender and ethereal Lullaby, sung by Clarin. The group contains four very distinct personalities that somehow manage to come together as a whole incorporating Korn's rock, Babbitt's folk, Zanandrea's blues and Clarin's pop.

Their next album, Submarine (Restless, 1988), maintains the earlier upbeat, trad sound while expanding the variety and maturity of their diverse styles. Zanandrea vents his lust to a hard-rock hook in the ultra-blues Little Less of Me and again, to frantic train-track tempo, in Hallelujah Dance (taking I Would Kill For Suzy to the max); then in Sister Tabitha he uses string section and harpsichord for a classical arrangement that breaks new ground yet could have been a Paisley Underground masterpiece. Babbitt gives a nod to Dylan in Grass, but Korn has the lion's share of material here, with a series of folk-rock refrains in heavy, noisy arrangements. Clarin sings the best of them, Apologize and Upside Down, but there's also Paradise and Alice on the Radio. And Korn authored the sweet ballad Postcard, covered in acid-rock glitter, as well as the hard-rock Crash Landing. They all have a pop sound par excellence, that sound somewhere between the bar and the garage.

The following year the Ex Cat Heads, consisting of Babbitt and Korn with a session man, put out Our Frisco (Twitch City, 1989), an album of humble and often acoustic numbers, among them Fog Rolls In; but the keystone of the album, Anti-Song, is again sung by Clarin, who returns just for this song. This time, Korn wedges his pop sound into a corner with a little too much modesty.

The true heirs to the Catheads are the other two members, Zanandrea and Clarin, who nonetheless had to struggle to find a record label. The album The Ode to Billy Joe Bob Dylan Thomas Jefferson Airplane Experience (Baited Breath, 1992) was released under their new name, It Thing. The duo (assisted by a bassist) enjoyed constructing superbly arranged, out-of-fashion pop songs, even though almost all the material was recorded in makeshift, low-tech conditions. The title track is, as the title suggests, a soldierly ode that opens with a military drumbeat, but the tender, naive hippie refrain is married with madrigal-esque vocal harmonies and a sinister, slovenly college-rock progression. This play of contrasts behind the seeming simplicity is probably the key to reading the entire album. In Send, we seem to hear all at once an old-timey jug band, the mannerist pop of Game Theory and the humble rock and roll of the Galaxie 500. Rite Me Rong manages to capture in one snapshot the bass drum of country and western, the hiccups of rockabilly and the crackling guitars of the 1920s.

Even if the high points of this record are the magical folk-rock tunes, the trio knows how to growl too, whether in the ultra-electrified Cupid Is a Sniper, the urgent Lonely Seconds, which recalls the Stones at their most tribal, or the agitated garage rock of Stop Thinking Curt.

In line with the psychedelic singers of the 1960s, the two songwriters indulge in apolitical tones: from the solemn and nervous Neil Young-esque elegy of Hole in the Back of My Head to the quasi-religious Hand Grenade to the lyrical testament of the album, Here Come the Flies, a disturbing metaphor of wartime surrender with a passage from the ethereal to the infernal that suggests Tim Buckley or Bob Dylan run through the mill of grunge rock.

Zanandrea and Clarin are two of the most independent minds of the 1980s. They inherited the hippies' unbridled imagination and propensity to experiment and steeped them in pure pop to create music without trends or boundaries.